To provide communication between different devices within a system, some type of interconnect mechanism is used. A wide variety of such interconnects are possible depending on a system implementation. Oftentimes to enable two devices to communicate with each other, they share a common communication protocol.
One typical communication protocol for communications between devices in a computer system is a Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCI Express™ (PCIe™)) communication protocol in accordance with links based on the PCI Express™ Specification Base Specification version 3.0 (published Nov. 18, 2010) (hereafter the PCIe™ Specification). This communication protocol is one example of a load/store input/output (IO) interconnect system. The communication between the devices is typically performed serially according to this protocol at very high speeds. Various parameters regarding this protocol were developed with the intent to achieve maximum performance without regard to power efficiency, as the PCIe™ communication protocol was developed in the context of desktop computers. As a result, many of its features do not scale down to lower power solutions that could be incorporated into mobile systems.
In addition to these power concerns with conventional load/store communication protocols, existing link management schemes are typically very complex and involve a large number of states, causing a lengthy process to perform transitions between the states. This is due in part to existing link management mechanisms, which were developed to comprehend multiple different form factor requirements such as connectors, different system incorporations and so forth. One such example is link management in accordance with the PCIe™ communication protocol.